Happy Ending
If there’s one thing which can totally ruin a good story, be it in written, audiographical, televisual or cinematic form, it’s some idiot pointing out the crucial plot device before you’ve read, heard or seen it.
Just to warn you, the following paragraphs assume that you’ve read The Lord of the Rings. If you haven’t and wish to without knowing the ending, pick up after the </end spoilers> tag!
My reading of The Lord of the Rings was blighted by a conversation the day before I borrowed a copy of it. Friends of mine JTA and Manny were discussing Gollum’s fall into Mount Doom and its implications for the story. Strangely, it was not this conversation, but one of its implications which ruined the book for me. I wasn’t paying attention (it was a games lesson, I was probably working on conserving body heat as we skived rather than involving myself with a conversation about a book I’d never read) and was only reminded of it’s occurring at all when, brandishing my borrowed-from-Manny copy of LoTR, JTA exclaimed “Ooops! We really shouldn’t have had that conversation about the death of Gollum yesterday!”
Thus, I spent the whole of the book anticipating that Gollum would die on the next page. Would his corpse fall from a cupboard in Bag End? Perhaps a Nazgûl would carry him off to its lair? Would he be balladed to death by Tom Bombadil? Maybe he fell into the flood as the Fellowship entered Rivendell?
…And so on, with added expectation when he actually appeared in the book. The little blighter could barely do anything even slightly dangerous without my being convinced that this hazardous activity would be his last. Why, oh why did his death have to be the climactic and unexpected conclusion of Tolkien’s tome? All right, so the bit where they pop back to the Shire and sort out Saruman wasn’t spoilt…but the despatching of a minor despot is just not the same as the beautiful irony inherent in Gollum’s destruction of the One Ring, now is it?
If there’s one thing wrong with popular culture, it’s the vast breadth of assimilated cliché and reference drawn from good stories, be they in written, audiographical, televisual or cinematic form, which means that anyone who has partaken in society at all already knows the plot twist without idiots even needing to intervene.
What must it have been like to see The Empire Strikes Back before it was widely know that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s dad? How was 1984 to a generation who didn’t have a stupid reality TV show named after one of the elements of the omnipotent state? Even simple, little things are a mystery: I’ll never be able to watch The Mark of Zorro without knowing that the sword-cut Z was his calling card. Was it blindingly obvious even to the first audience who saw the film?
This phenomenon is not restricted to foreknown human narratives, however. There’s something about studying science, or even just progressing forwards in life, which squeezes the child-like wonder from the World.
I will never see a total eclipse without knowing exactly what’s going on, and being surrounded by swarms of people doing exactly what I’m doing. I’ve seen tens of pictures and videos, so I even know exactly what it will look like. One of the most amazing and disconcerting spectacles in nature has been watered down into a well-documented and predictable event which won’t unsettle the tourists.
Perhaps I should take solace in the fact that, however trivially science can rationalise away awe-inspiring phenomena, there’s still a little bit of my brain terrified that I can’t properly visualise seventy thousand billion billion kilos of rock moving at a kilometre per second in front of a sphere of searing plasma over one million kilometres across.
The blood of a caveman, nervous at his miniscule understanding of the Universe, still flows in me somewhere. It can’t being back Lord of the Rings, though.